Finite-Time Analysis of Discounted Exponential-Utility Reinforcement Learning2608.01917AuthorsVivek T A,Aditya Kumar,Gugan Thoppe,Prashanth L. A,Ankur NaskarAbstractDiscounted exponential utility provides a principled criterion for risk-sensitive sequential decision-making, but its nonlinear structure complicates reinforcement learning. A recent work \citep addressed this difficulty by introducing a Bellman-compatible surrogate and two model-free fixed-point algorithms for optimizing it over stationary policies. However, their main convergence results are asymptotic. In this work, we establish finite-time rates of $\tilde (1/\sqrt)$ for the aforementioned two algorithms under asynchronous Markovian sampling, where $n$ is the iteration index and $\tilde$ hides logarithmic expressions. Importantly, we employ parameter-free choices for the stepsize parameter to derive these rate results. For the algorithmically simpler one-timescale method, the main challenge is that its update equation is not directly aligned with the contraction geometry of its underlying power-law operator. We overcome this mismatch by exploiting the boundedness, monotonicity, and homogeneity of the operator to obtain a local pseudo-contraction property for the relative-error dynamics. We then use a Moreau-envelope-based Lyapunov function and Polyak--Ruppert averaging to obtain the stated convergence rate with parameter-free stepsizes. For the two-timescale method, the main challenge is to control a tracking error on the faster timescale. These results provide the first finite-time guarantees for model-free discounted exponential-utility reinforcement learning.ResourcesView on Hugging FaceRead PDFArXiv
Finite-Time Analysis of Discounted Exponential-Utility Reinforcement Learning
Discounted exponential utility provides a principled criterion for risk-sensitive sequential decision-making, but its nonlinear structure complicates reinfor...
Related
ResearchLearning When to Trust via Selective Context Preference Optimization
Language models increasingly condition their answers on external signals, and a single misleading one can turn a correct answer wrong. The obvious remedy, training models to resist such signals, hides a failure mode: a model that ignores all context looks robust yet is useless when the context is worth trusting. We recast the problem as selective trust and introduce MIST, a human-annotated benchmark that renders each reasoning item under four matched conditions (clean, misleading, correct-context, and irrelevant-context), together with SC2W, a paired metric counting how often a misle
Learning When to Trust via Selective Context Preference Optimization
Language models increasingly condition their answers on external signals, and a single misleading one can turn a correct answer wrong. The obvious remedy, tr...
ResearchTracing the Heart: An Evidence-Linked Pipeline for Heart-Failure Feature Engineering
Electronic health record (EHR) feature engineering is a major bottleneck in clinical research and AI, accounting for 39-45% of data scientists' workload. This is especially pronounced in heart failure, which affects an estimated 6.7 million U.S. adults and requires integrating fragmented EHR data with disease-specific, guideline-based clinical reasoning. Existing rule-based and large language model (LLM)-based approaches offer only partial automation with limited maintainability and evidence traceability. We developed the Nimblemind Multi-Agent System (nMAS), an evidence-linked, rubr